Neil Wehrle

A couple of articles I came across provide insight into the development of our ability to read. Not only are some novel explanations put forward, but it comes at a time when one of my daughters has experienced what is described. Examples of how evolution can explain seemingly impossible developments in human are always interesting [...]

William Poundstone unravels a great example of how businesses use “nudges” to direct user (customer) behavior to make choices they otherwise might not.
“Puzzles, anchors, stars, and plowhorses; those are a few of the terms consultants now use when assembling a menu (which is as much an advertisement as anything else). “A star is a popular, [...]

A short but interesting article in the WSJ goes into the use of “nudges” and social pressure to encourage people to modify their behavior. The basic idea is that people don’t always behave rationally or in their best self-interest. While this wasn’t big news to the rest of the world, apparently it is for many [...]

I’ve been an Amazon user for almost 14 years now, starting with books and moving on to just about everything else they sell. For the last couple of years I’ve downloaded MP3s (initially just to avoid Apple’s DRM, but now because I can find music much more easily). Every time, though I have had to [...]

Wired Science has a short discussion about how humans recognize and process facial characteristics and why we sometimes stare at people with facial deformities. An evolutionary response causes our brain to momentarily stumble when we see people that don’t have symmetrical features:
To decide, your eyes sweep over the person’s face, retrieving only parts, mainly just [...]

One of the pleasures of holiday breaks is the opportunity to read an entire book in a short period of time. Many books I have read were consumed in fits and starts, at night or on the subway. Over the winter 2008-09 break I had the pleasure to read The World Without Us, which came [...]

From the New Yorker 6/30/08:
The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a [...]

Just wanted to jot down a principle I’ve come across a couple places and tends to explain a lot of the erroneous (although often well-intentioned) paths we go down: people often mistake (or elevate) differences of degree for difference of kind.
From the NYTimes Magazine, an article on gender-based education covers the merits and demerits of [...]

In grad school, we talked a lot about invention. Invention is distinct from discovery and the scientific method in that it is a process of combination rather than unique observation or singular insight. This helps mark the distinction between designers and scientists – the latter is about finding a single truth, while the former can [...]

I came across this today – this is an area of interest to me, which is how to get people to make better choices without limiting their options. This book which deals with the mechanisms behind this, namely how to offer choices to people but to “nudge” them to make the best choice: http://www.nudges.org/
Things like getting [...]